By, Jessica Towns
~ Marcia Barton Prize Winner ~
For John Newman
a sentence crept onto my chest last night
as i fell asleep—the warm, fleecy words
of the elegy i’ve tried to write for months.
he would have told me to write it down.
he warned against the slippery fingers
of the mind, the pillow’s downy teeth.
but i thought it was too perfect to forget
and woke up knowing just that there’d
been something to remember—
that something irreplaceable had slipped
out through my curtains into the foggy
night, to live on only in the periphery
like a raccoon’s hungry rustle
or the flicker of a brake light.